We Are All In Drag

Living Happy Round-up

Oct 10, 2022

When I went to get my MFA in writing, one of my mentors looked at me and said, “The people who succeed in this program are the people who put in the work and who are unafraid.”

This did not sound good to me because I was pretty much having massive imposter syndrome and afraid of everything about the program, the other students, the mentors, even the term “objective correlative.”

But he said, “No, timid one. Not afraid of the world, but afraid to try new things. The writers who limit themselves. You aren’t one of those.”

And at that moment, I swore that I wouldn’t be. Sometimes I forget this.

Rene Descartes believed that he knew he had life because he was thinking. He heard words or thought pictures. Thus, he was alive.

I tend not to think in words or pictures and just exist. My thoughts come to me in bursts that I choose (or not) to put to words or image. It’s more like knowings? I obviously don’t have the words to describe it. Does that make me not alive to Descartes?

I doubt it. We are also alive because we feel.

On the website The Science of NonDuality, they write,

“The Feeling of Being Me There is a subset of sensory experience that is special, and that has more relevance to human experience than the rest. It is the sensory experience of being “me,” of being an ego. This sensory experience is centered around self-referential thinking and feeling. The narrative voice in your head, the pictures in your mind’s eye, and the emotions you’re having right now constitute almost all of it. There are sometimes other sensations, like memories of smells and so forth, but these are relatively uncommon compared to the big three (mental talk, mental pictures, and emotions).”

And it goes on to say,

“Understanding the ego as a sensory experience is extremely useful, because it allows us to get a handle on it. We can deconstruct the sensory experience of being an ego just like we can deconstruct any other sensory experience. And yet because the experience of being “me” is different than other experiences, the results are not the same. When you deconstruct the experience of being an ego, you deconstruct your sense of self.”

So we and our society construct us and also deconstruct us.

RuPaul in his MasterClass says that as a child he promised himself that he wouldn’t be restricted by what color crayon to use or what music to listen to. He wanted to explore it all.

“You’re born naked and the rest is drag,” RuPaul says. Everything you do is a construct and built. Drag is an obvious construct, but everyone, he stresses, has a construct.

“The identities we give ourselves are really just temporary, they are not the deepest level of who we truly are,” he says.

So that means that at least to a certain extent we can construct or deconstruct who we are.

In the material for the class, he writes, “If you’re trying to be somebody else, you won’t be happy with the results you get. But when you find your own frequency, there’s an ease to life: it feels like a warm jacket, a well-worn boot, or the home you’ve always wanted to live in. And if you’re paying attention to your emotional landscape, you’ll recognize it when you find it.”

The Science and Nonduality website puts it like this,

“It is possible to have a high-functioning ego in perfect working condition and to simultaneously understand on a very deep level that it is not who you are. This realization is a life-changing experience; one that continues to deepen and become enriched as life continues. That is where not only the relief from mental suffering, but also the clarity, openness, and freedom really begin to enter the picture.”

One of my favorite things RuPaul’s MasterClass materials says is that it can be jarring to realize that who we are and what we are taught isn’t always what’s real. He uses the tooth fairy as an example. You can use Santa Clause or even for some of us the American Dream.

“When the rug gets pulled out from under you and you suddenly see the Matrix for what it is, it’s easy to find yourself trapped in anger, cynicism, and bitterness. But the next level of recognition is to realize that if life is an illusion, the goal should be to take it all in stride. Don’t get stuck in the bitterness. Get to the next level, which is where the joy is.”

The first two assignments in RuPaul’s MasterClass are these: